Waggestad Therese Händel, Kirsebom Bjørn Eivind, Strobel Carsten, Wallin Anders, Eckerström Marie, Fladby Tormod, Egeland Jens
Vestfold Hospital Trust, Tønsberg, Norway.
Department of Neurology, University Hospital of North Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jul 27;14:1227578. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1227578. eCollection 2023.
The Trail Making Test (TMT) is commonly used worldwide to evaluate cognitive decline and car driving ability. However, it has received critique for its dependence on the Latin alphabet and thus, the risk of misclassifying some participants. Alphabet support potentially increases test validity by avoiding misclassification of executive dysfunction in participants with dyslexia and those with insufficient automatization of the Latin alphabet. However, Alphabet support might render the test less sensitive to set-shifting, thus compromising the validity of the test. This study compares two versions of the TMT: with and without alphabet support.
We compared the TMT-A, TMT-B, and TMT-B:A ratios in two independent normative samples with ( = 220) and without ( = 64) alphabet support using multiple regression analysis adjusted for age and education. The sample comprised Scandinavians aged 70-84 years. Alphabet support was included by adding the Latin alphabet A-L on top of the page on the TMT-B. We hypothesized that alphabet support would not change the TMT-B:A ratio.
After adjusting for age and years of education, there were no significant differences between the two samples in the TMT-A, TMT-B, or the ratio score (TMT-B:A).
Our results suggest that the inclusion of alphabet support does not alter TMT's ability to measure set-shifting in a sample of older Scandinavian adults.
连线测验（TMT）在全球范围内广泛用于评估认知衰退和驾驶能力。然而，它因依赖拉丁字母而受到批评，存在对一些参与者错误分类的风险。字母支持可能通过避免对诵读困难者和拉丁字母自动化不足者的执行功能障碍进行错误分类来提高测试效度。然而，字母支持可能会使测试对任务转换的敏感性降低，从而损害测试的效度。本研究比较了有和没有字母支持的两个版本的TMT。
我们使用针对年龄和教育程度进行调整的多元回归分析，比较了两个独立的常模样本中TMT-A、TMT-B和TMT-B:A比率，其中一个样本（n = 220）有字母支持，另一个样本（n = 64）没有字母支持。样本包括70至84岁的斯堪的纳维亚人。在TMT-B页面顶部添加拉丁字母A-L以提供字母支持。我们假设字母支持不会改变TMT-B:A比率。
在对年龄和受教育年限进行调整后，两个样本在TMT-A、TMT-B或比率得分（TMT-B:A）方面没有显著差异。
我们的结果表明，在斯堪的纳维亚老年成年人样本中，加入字母支持不会改变TMT测量任务转换的能力。
